Just War as Christian Discipleship
Recentering the Tradition in the Church Rather than the State
By Daniel M. Bell, Jr. Brazos. $21.99. Pp. 267. ISBN 1587432250.

We live in a time of wars and rumors of wars, but of course for the church it has never really been otherwise. Christians have thought hard about the problem of war for centuries, not always well and not always as much as they should have, but nevertheless enough to have built up a large tradition of reflection on the issue. Unfortunately, says Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary’s Daniel Bell, too few Christians today are familiar with their own body of teaching on just war. And the sad result is predictable: many of us tend to talk about war in a way that simply mirrors our nationalism and partisan polarization, so that an onlooker might be forgiven for thinking that at bottom our convictions depend more on our loyalties to America, the G.O.P., or the Democratic Party, rather than to Christ and his church.

Others of us might make serious appeal to just war categories, but even these conversations tend to swing around to issues of public policy, so that “just war” becomes a matter of ticking items off an ethical checklist for decision-makers in Washington. What’s missing in all of this, Bell argues, is a serious appraisal of what it would take to be a just war people, along with what it would mean to think about war not simply as a public policy issue or as a necessary evil but as an outgrowth of faithful Christian discipleship. Changing how we think and act, Bell argues, if today’s church is to renew its witness to a world of war, will require us to put aside patterns of thought rooted in partisanship and the modern nation-state and listen once again to the Christian just war tradition.

The first thing to be said about Christian just war, according to Bell, is that if it somehow involves accepting some kind of lesser evil for the sake of a greater good, it’s not deserving of the name. Neither Jesus, Paul, nor any other New Testament figure authorizes us to sin all the more so that grace may abound, and Bell, following a solid tradition of Christian ethical thought, as such refuses to countenance any kind of consequentalist logic. Unfortunately, many 20th-century Protestant ethicists from Reinhold Niebuhr to Joseph Fletcher subscribed to just this kind of consequentalism, and it continues to animate a great deal of thought about war still today.

Niebuhr, classically, thought that Jesus represented an “impossible possibility,” a nonviolent ethic of peace that could never work in the real world, which meant that Christian thought about war had to forget about following Jesus and instead focus on how best to manage the interplay of power against power in a violent world. Bell dismisses this kind of thinking in the sharpest possible terms. What it amounts to, he argues, is kicking God upstairs so that we can carry on as if God hasn’t made a difference in the world. If we truly believe, however, that God sanctifies and equips the church for witness and holy living, then this kind of thought simply isn’t an option. In fact, for Bell, it’s precisely the kind of logic used by the people who nailed Jesus to the cross. Somehow, if just war is truly to be Christian, it instead has to be part of taking up the cross and following Jesus as one of his faithful disciples.

Of course, on the surface of it, it’s not very easy to see how taking up the cross and following Jesus would lead a Christian disciple to take up a gun and kill someone. Bell admits that this is a very serious objection, with solid scriptural support and the nonviolent witness of the early Church on its side. Although he does not directly engage with their work, it is just this kind of reasoning that led ethicists such as John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas (the latter of whom was Bell’s dissertation adviser at Duke) to support pacifism: they thought that since Jesus was nonviolent, so also must be his disciples. The underlying motivation for Yoder and Hauerwas, however, was never pacifism per se but instead following Jesus as the norm for Christian ethics. And since Bell agrees that following Jesus no matter what the cost is indeed what Christians are called to do (unlike the “impossible possibility” logic of Niebuhr), it becomes absolutely necessary for him to understand just war as a mode of taking up the cross, as counterintuitive as this may seem.

For support, Bell turns to Augustine, who understood just war as an act of neighbor-love, a sort of “kind harshness” undertaken out of concern for the common good that aims at restraining wickedness and restoring justice and peace. Just wars, seen this way, are acts of love in that they genuinely are ordered toward the good of others (including our enemies), instead of being ordered toward self-defense, self-aggrandizement, or revenge. This depends, of course, on a larger Augustinian vision of politics (which itself depends on Romans 13), in which God grants continuing authority to the state to “take up the sword” to restrain evil and establish an earthly peace. Bell does not so much argue for this position as he assumes it: other writers, he explains, have already argued the case satisfactorily, and his focus instead is explicating what it means to follow Jesus in loving our neighbors and enemies in the field of warfare.

Bell does not, of course, mean to say that the state can do anything it wants to restrain evil and establish peace: as we have already seen, he strongly cautions us against accepting any kind of “lesser evil for the sake of a greater good” logic. Working out how warfare might be conducted in love is, in essence, the entire object of just war theory, and Bell spends the greatest part of his book working through the seven classical criteria of just war: legitimate authority, just cause, right intent, last resort, reasonable chance of success, discrimination in combat, and proportionality. Crucially, Bell distinguishes between what he calls “Just War as Public Policy” and “Just War as Christian Discipleship,” wherein the former is centered in the goals of the secular nation-state and focused on public policy decisions, and the latter is centered in the mission of the Christian church and focused on being a faithful and just people.

Quite often, Bell claims, Christian just war contrasts sharply with secular just war. Just cause, to take what perhaps is the clearest example of this, is regarded quite differently by the Christian tradition: while modern, secular just war understands just cause to be grounded in self-defense (and as such has difficulty articulating a rationale for humanitarian intervention), Christian just war is rooted in neighbor-love and rejects self-defense altogether. It amounts, Bell argues, to very different visions of justice: a “justice for me” based on self-interest, and an other-directed “justice for all” ordered toward the common good. Although this shift would not, Bell explains, rule out fighting wars in defense of American citizens (since they, too, are neighbors we are called to love), it would change the discussion about war quite dramatically, since the central question would no longer be American “interests” (e.g., hitting back at the Taliban) but instead the common human good (say, committing troops to prevent genocide in Rwanda or Sudan).

Another crucial difference, for Bell, has to do with reasonable chance of success. In short, this criterion refers to the moral imperative to draw back from wars that one cannot reasonably expect to fight justly and win. Some secular just war theorists, such as Michael Walzer, have argued that in cases of “supreme emergency,” when an entire way of life is at stake, a nation may override this criterion and use tactics otherwise regarded as unjust. But for Bell, this amounts to making the nation into an idol of ultimate value, on whose behalf even justice may be sacrificed.

The church, by contrast, is principally concerned with faithfulness rather than survival (for which it trusts the promises of God). This leads, as such, to what Bell calls the moral imperative of surrender: if a war cannot be fought justly, then it simply ought not be fought. One example of this criterion’s bite, although Bell does not make the point directly, would be the way it arguably should lead us to consider the possession of nuclear weapons highly suspect, since as weapons ordered toward the mass killing of civilians they seemingly cannot be used under the criteria of proportionality and noncombatant discrimination. Even if, the argument would run, unilateral divestiture of nuclear arms during the Cold War might have required American surrender to the Soviet Union, it would nevertheless have been the just thing to do.

Perhaps most important of all, from Bell’s perspective, is the need for Christians to be formed into just and virtuous people if they are to have the character that it takes to fight wars justly. Although Bell takes great care to explain each of the just war criteria, he accords just as much if not more emphasis to the church’s call to become a just people. Although the point may sound obvious — after all, no amount of just war theorizing by scholars will matter one whit in times of crisis if American voters and leaders don’t care about fighting justly — it actually is not, given the focus of most just war thought on public policy and the demanding sacrifices that a commitment to just war would involve. To fight wars justly as Christian disciples, Bell contends, we first must be formed in virtue by a just community — and the name of that community, of course, is church, since only God can give us the character, strength, and faith that we need to take up our crosses and fight justly.

Bell’s treatment of just war does not answer every question, of course. Which wars do we fight? How might we find ways other than war to bring about peace and justice? And how might U.S. soldiers be trained to both fight and genuinely love their enemies at the same time? No doubt, Bell would be highly sympathetic to such questions, and what he has given us treats his chosen topic fairly and well. The book’s dedication is to the bishops of Bell’s own United Methodist Church, and is meant by Bell to be read widely by Christian pastors and lay leaders. At bottom, the book is an urgent call for Christians to learn their own church’s just war tradition, most particularly pastors charged with forming their congregations into just war people. Every pastor faced with leading a parish through times filled with wars and rumors of wars — and what pastor is not? — would do well to read it.

Cross-posted at The Living Church.